What is an error budget and how does it relate to SLOs?

An error budget is the complement of your SLO target — if your SLO is 99.9% availability over 30 days, your error budget is 0.1%, which equals about 43 minutes of downtime. The error budget quantifies how much unreliability you can tolerate while still meeting your objective. When the error budget is exhausted, teams should freeze feature releases and prioritize reliability work. Burn-rate alerts notify you when you are consuming your error budget faster than expected.

Should I use rolling or calendar windows for SLOs?

Rolling windows (e.g., last 28 days) provide a continuous view of service health and are recommended for operational alerting because they avoid the reset-at-month-boundary problem where a service looks healthy after a bad month resets. Calendar windows (monthly, quarterly) align with business reporting periods and contractual SLAs. Many teams use rolling windows for operational SLOs and calendar windows for business reporting.

GCP SLO Config Builder

MonitoringGCP

Build SLO configurations for Cloud Monitoring with request-based SLIs, burn rate alerts, and error budget tracking.

Cloud Monitoring SLOs Configuration

Build SLO configurations for Cloud Monitoring with request-based SLIs, burn rate alerts, and error budget tracking.

Required Fields

serviceNameslo.displayNameslo.goalslo.serviceLevelIndicator

{
  "serviceName": "projects/my-project/services/api-gateway",
  "slo": {
    "displayName": "API Gateway Availability SLO - 99.9%",
    "goal": 0.999,
    "rollingPeriod": "2592000s",
    "serviceLevelIndicator": {
      "requestBased": {
        "goodTotalRatio": {
          "goodServiceFilter": "resource.type=\"cloud_run_revision\" AND metric.type=\"run.googleapis.com/request_count\" AND metric.labels.response_code_class=\"2xx\"",
          "totalServiceFilter": "resource.type=\"cloud_run_revision\" AND metric.type=\"run.googleapis.com/request_count\""
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "alertPolicies": [
    {
      "displayName": "SLO Burn Rate - Fast Burn (2%)",
      "burnRate": {
        "lookbackDuration": "3600s",
        "threshold": 14.4
      },
      "notificationChannels": [
        "projects/my-project/notificationChannels/pagerduty-critical"
      ]
    },
    {
      "displayName": "SLO Burn Rate - Slow Burn (5%)",
      "burnRate": {
        "lookbackDuration": "21600s",
        "threshold": 6.0
      },
      "notificationChannels": [
        "projects/my-project/notificationChannels/slack-sre"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "errorBudget": {
    "totalRequestsPerMonth": 10000000,
    "allowedFailures": 10000,
    "budgetMinutes": 43.2,
    "currentConsumptionPercent": 15.3
  }
}

Generated Output

Output will appear here...

About This Tool

Service Level Objectives (SLOs) in Cloud Monitoring let you define and track reliability targets for your services based on measurable Service Level Indicators (SLIs) like availability, latency, and throughput. SLOs integrate with error budgets and burn-rate alerts to help you balance reliability investment with feature velocity. This builder helps you configure SLO definitions with compliance targets, rolling or calendar windows, SLI methods (request-based or window-based), and burn-rate alerting thresholds.

When to Use This Tool

•Defining a 99.9% availability SLO for a Cloud Run service measured over a 28-day rolling window with burn-rate alerts
•Creating a latency SLO that targets 95% of requests completing within 200ms, with a fast-burn alert at 14x consumption rate
•Building SLOs for GKE services using Istio/Cloud Service Mesh metrics as the SLI source for request-based availability tracking
•Configuring calendar-based SLOs aligned with monthly business reporting periods to track reliability against contractual commitments

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an error budget and how does it relate to SLOs?: An error budget is the complement of your SLO target — if your SLO is 99.9% availability over 30 days, your error budget is 0.1%, which equals about 43 minutes of downtime. The error budget quantifies how much unreliability you can tolerate while still meeting your objective. When the error budget is exhausted, teams should freeze feature releases and prioritize reliability work. Burn-rate alerts notify you when you are consuming your error budget faster than expected.
Should I use rolling or calendar windows for SLOs?: Rolling windows (e.g., last 28 days) provide a continuous view of service health and are recommended for operational alerting because they avoid the reset-at-month-boundary problem where a service looks healthy after a bad month resets. Calendar windows (monthly, quarterly) align with business reporting periods and contractual SLAs. Many teams use rolling windows for operational SLOs and calendar windows for business reporting.

Related Learning Guides

GCP Network Security Guide24 min read

Disclaimer: This tool runs entirely in your browser. No data is sent to our servers. Always verify outputs before using them in production. AWS, Azure, and GCP are trademarks of their respective owners.

GCP SLO Config Builder

MonitoringGCP

Build SLO configurations for Cloud Monitoring with request-based SLIs, burn rate alerts, and error budget tracking.

Cloud Monitoring SLOs Configuration

Build SLO configurations for Cloud Monitoring with request-based SLIs, burn rate alerts, and error budget tracking.

Required Fields

serviceNameslo.displayNameslo.goalslo.serviceLevelIndicator

Generated Output

Output will appear here...

About This Tool

When to Use This Tool

•Defining a 99.9% availability SLO for a Cloud Run service measured over a 28-day rolling window with burn-rate alerts
•Creating a latency SLO that targets 95% of requests completing within 200ms, with a fast-burn alert at 14x consumption rate
•Building SLOs for GKE services using Istio/Cloud Service Mesh metrics as the SLI source for request-based availability tracking
•Configuring calendar-based SLOs aligned with monthly business reporting periods to track reliability against contractual commitments

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an error budget and how does it relate to SLOs?: An error budget is the complement of your SLO target — if your SLO is 99.9% availability over 30 days, your error budget is 0.1%, which equals about 43 minutes of downtime. The error budget quantifies how much unreliability you can tolerate while still meeting your objective. When the error budget is exhausted, teams should freeze feature releases and prioritize reliability work. Burn-rate alerts notify you when you are consuming your error budget faster than expected.
Should I use rolling or calendar windows for SLOs?: Rolling windows (e.g., last 28 days) provide a continuous view of service health and are recommended for operational alerting because they avoid the reset-at-month-boundary problem where a service looks healthy after a bad month resets. Calendar windows (monthly, quarterly) align with business reporting periods and contractual SLAs. Many teams use rolling windows for operational SLOs and calendar windows for business reporting.

Related Learning Guides

GCP Network Security Guide24 min read